Failure is important; Get that from Sportpesa CEO, Ronald Karauri

Making it in Kenya in business in Kenya is not a easy task as many of us could have realized with research showing that small businesses die within their three year period.


Ronald Karauri is one of those that have gone against odds to become one of the who is who category in the world of betting, speaking to local media, shone some light on being a young entrepreneur and what he actually did to get to the top.

His clear advice on being an entrepreneur is that nothing comes easy, something that many young people think it’s a walk in the park.

“The biggest thing selling right now is people giving tips on how to succeed, how to make money and all that. The biggest thing I want to tell young people is nothing is easy, it takes a lot of time.

People think I just woke up in SportPesa and made a lot of money, but they don’t realise is that I’m an A student from Mang’u, I became a pilot and flew planes for 10 years.

I had some businesses which failed but everything has its time. When you have your business, put all your focus into it and you will succeed. It has to be something that you know.

Don’t venture into something you don’t know. Sometimes as Kenyans what we do is follow the crowd. You hear this has money let me start my own company. If you have something that you really know how to do, you can invest in it, put all your time and I have no doubt that you will succeed but it’s not easy especially entrepreneurship.

It is a really hard road and a big risk to take. People should be aware that it’s never easy, it takes time and even for us, as I told you, we are still building and trying to get regulation right. With entrepreneurship, you need to be ready to take the risk and have long sleepless nights.”

Many young people think that failure is not an option and they must succeed in everything they do, but Karauri begs to differ.

Having started as a pilot 10 years ago he had massive responsibilities that came with his job and most part of it he was stressed out because of the things that came with being a leader.

“For most of my life, even when I went into flying, the challenges were not as big as I thought. My biggest challenge came when I was the CEO of the pilots association you can see what is happening at Kenya Airways right now”.

”I could not control any of those challenges and I was very stressed, but it was a big learning point for me because moving forward you know how to deal with it. It gave me insomnia but if I had had those failures before, it would have helped me shape how to face those challenges and balance everything so that you are not so stressed.”

“I think failure is so important because once you wake up from that failure, you might never fall down again.”

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